Nora Turato: pool7

This new work is very much about indeterminate selfhood as Turato immerses the visitor in a swimming pool-like psychological space – is she a mystic or a charlatan, or both?

Nora Turato pool7: Logical Freeze, 2025 (still). Single-channel audio installation, approx 15 min. Image courtesy the artist.

ICA, London
9 April – 8 June 2025

by TOM DENMAN

How do we attend to art that feeds off our limitless appetite for distraction? In less than a decade, Nora Turato has soared to fame by using language and performance – and a magician’s charisma – to hack our minds. Her approach seems to be to “pool” phrases and bereave them of any context that might otherwise determine their meaning, and then to graphic-design and publish them in books or blow them up on posters or walls. The mode of presentation gives the text a declarative register, sinisterly approximating verbiage designed to get inside us, the (anglophone) world’s guff that virally self-replicates in our minds and tongues and posts and awful emailspeak. Turato also vocalises the text, usually in live performances, acting as a kind of medium or charlatan, or a medium possessed by a charlatan, or a charlatan pretending to be a medium, or any number of these things at once – threading non-narratives into polymeric streams of consciousness. The result is moreishly beguiling, and disconcertingly so, too, as she appeals so ruthlessly to our inattention. In Turato’s hands, our mind is like a juggler’s ball: she feeds us “content” so slippery it prompts our distraction which she then intercepts with more “content”, over and over again.

Nora Turato: pool7 [text], 2025. Printed text on approx 1,800 sheets of A4 paper. Photo: Rob Harris. Image courtesy the artist.

Lining the walls of the ICA’s main exhibition space, the central component of the three-part, seventh iteration of Turato’s “pool” series is something like a swimming pool, a sunken room “tiled” with 1,800 A4 printouts. Although spelled and pronounced the same way, the versions of the word “pool” – one signifying a reserve supply of something, the other a flat expanse of liquid – have different etymologies, and Turato’s tricksterish pool-equals-pool illogic declares language’s independence from lexical authority, as well as her own authority to make up the rules as she goes along. Don’t run, surfaces may be slippery.

Nora Turato: pool7 [text], 2025 (detail). Printed text on approx 1,800 sheets of A4 paper. Photo: Rob Harris. Image courtesy the artist.

But what really distinguishes pool7 from previous iterations is its performative focus on the self. The work is rhetorically undesigned, consisting of bog-standard A4 no higher than “the artist’s comfortable reach”, the text in default Arial font, Turato’s language “personal” and “not belaboured”, to pinch a few words from the wall label, which wants us to think that all this makes the work more authentic to the artist’s mind, body and soul. But this is Turato – who in her 2024 solo show at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles had the words “authenticity” and “haha” printed in huge lettering across adjacent walls, and who trained as a graphic designer and knows what she is doing, and these are all considered choices, no less so than the gridded display and casually versified mise-en-page. And, as always, her words have a pétillant relational logic – perhaps because most of them are thoughts, or fragments of thought, or so we are told. The layered lines “aesthetics are repressive” and “my back hurts” are cleverly placed so you have to stoop to read them.

The swimming pool submerges us in a kind of psychological space where meaning and identity are adrift: “she will never spill her beans | she squeezes her beans tightly | she makes bean paste | and she makes a mess | she is 45 but she is 9”, is written on the first sheet I read, the word “beans” flitting between innuendo and innocence as different meanings fold in on themselves, becoming the “mess” that is selfhood. If, compared to her previous iterations of pool (in which the text is more billboardy), pool7 brings us closer to a person, that person is less Turato than a self with an indeterminate identity, just as her decontextualised phrases bear the ghostly imprint of vague meanings: “to keep ur head on | keep ur face on” is followed by a large gap and then “not putting on a face”, and another line reading “my head | im loosing it”. On the neighbouring sheet is written: “i want | an innocent eye | an empty head”. I am reminded of the philosopher Simone Weil’s idea of decreation, a mental, mystical practice whereby we withdraw ourselves in order to attend compassionately to others, and so for a moment I find myself wondering if Turato is not dealing in attention rather than its opposite.

Nora Turato pool7: Logical Freeze, 2025 (still). Single-channel audio installation, approx 15 min. Image courtesy the artist.

The thought stays with me in the neighbouring room, a dark chamber with cushions on which we are invited to recline and listen to Turato perform vocal exercises and utter words that embody the same degree of self-dissolution seen on the A4 sheets. The phrases I manage to scribble down suggest gravity and grace, as she sing-screams, “Into ground I run it allllll!” and “I don’t fly, I crawwwwl”, her voice performing a kind of guttural purging, and minutes later she has an airborne out of body experience: “I got fucked out of me … I was hovering over me … Hovering over the shit …” The sound is all intensely defined, eliciting ASMR. As she chews, shallows, chokes on and coughs up her words, the sound of saliva and jarring valves is so precise it tingles, as if echoing within my own (emptied) skull. As Turato eats and regurgitates language, language which, in a sense, incarnates Turato, I feel as if I, too, am devouring words which are me, or possessed by the artist, and preoccupied by the question of who is devouring whom. Whatever is happening – and this is where my comparison with Weil tapers off – my encounter is less an empathic bridging between self and other than a technologically imposed immersion into another’s nonself.

Nora Turato pool7: Logical Freeze, 2025. Single-channel audio installation, approx 15 min. Photo: Rob Harris Image courtesy the artist.

If the swimming pool is text and the chamber sound, Turato’s silent videos on the swimming pool’s outer wall (in the ICA’s main corridor) are vision, perceptual compartmentalisation nicely choreographing the show’s overall aesthetic of relational play. On eight monitors we see Turato acting out, with her body and hands and face, more or less the same self-purgation as the words and noises read and heard in the other works. She wriggles and strains as if performing a self-exorcism; with one hand, she grips her throat and expels a chakric blockage – language itself, perhaps, or one of the demons she channels in her other performances. I am reminded of a drama warmup or breathwork, practices to give up the ego and become an empty vessel.

I think about Weil again, and give the work another chance. Could Turato’s project be mystical, or even alchemical, transforming verbal diarrhoea into something to take us outside our heads (and their digital appendages), eschewing endemic distraction? Part of me wants to say yes, the part that is impressed by her artful delivery and likes to think she is less cynically in cahoots with the power she mimics than she seems to be. But to say yes is to surrender to a kind of hypnosis that banks on our attention’s flitting from phrase to phrase, page to page, screen to screen, utterance to utterance – all in a manner too akin to the workings of snake oil merchantry for me to be convinced that she is really critiquing it (if that is even what she is trying to do), and so to relinquish myself in this context feels too much like falling into the clutches of governance. As long as clickbait and the mindless absorption of “content” dominate our personal and political lives, I would prefer to get out of the pool.